Background
Tolson was born on Feb. 6, 1900, in Moberly, Missouri, United States. Tolson was one of four children.
Tolson was born on Feb. 6, 1900, in Moberly, Missouri, United States. Tolson was one of four children.
He studied at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and at Columbia University.
After studies he taught English, speech, and drama at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and at Langston University in Oklahoma. In 1965 he was invited to a special ceremony at the White House, where he presented a copy of Harlem Gallery to President Lyndon Johnson.
Rendezvous with America, despite some indications of future power, remains the work of a poet who has not yet found his voice. Still a prisoner of Marxist ideology and an antiquated, Whitmanesque idiom, Tolson explores most of his essential themes without achieving much memorable poetry. In Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, he abandons the cadences of Whitman and Carl Sandburg for those of T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane. The poem is a work of dazzling virtuosity wherein Liberia, "the quicksilver sparrow that slips/The eagle's claw! , " emerges as a symbol not so much of decolonization as of the spiritual regeneration of Africa. Harlem Gallery is an epic whose avowed aim is to chronicle "a people's New World odyssey/from chattel to Esquire. " On its surface the poem is an evocation of Harlem life from the 1920's onward. At bottom it is a refutation of Gertrude Stein's charge that the black "suffers from Nothingness. " Using the piano keyboard as a central metaphor, Tolson insists that American culture is a "Rhapsody in Black and White. "
An iconoclast, he was quite prepared for a lifetime of neglect. Tolson was a man of impressive intellect.
Quotes from others about the person
He created poetry that was “funny, witty, humoristic, slapstick, rude, cruel, bitter, and hilarious, ” as reviewer Karl Shapiro described the Harlem Gallery.
In 1922, Melvin Tolson married Ruth Southall of Charlottesville, Virginia, whom he had met as a student at Lincoln University. Their first child was Melvin Beaunorus Tolson, Jr.